Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

High school students in Old Saybrook, Conn., were not happy when their various Facebook photos and status updates were displayed at a freshman school assembly. But administrators say the presentation was meant to teach students a lesson about Internet safety, specifically privacy settings. Many students were upset that the school didn’t ask for permission before showing their information, which a school resource counselor pulled from Twitter and Tumblr. “I just think it’s a violation of privacy,” a junior at the school told the New Haven Register. Oliver Barton, principal of Old Saybrook High School, said that the assembly was meant to show students how public their tweets, online profiles and photos are if their privacy settings aren’t strict enough. He didn’t think the pictures shown would embarrass anyone, he told the paper, and the pictures in question were publicly accessible. About 20 photos were assembled by…

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Saying you will kill someone sounds like fighting words to me and not the type of free expression of ideas our founding fathers had in mind. Threatening to kill another human being is not the correct way to resolve a judicial dispute. I admit I am currently studying First amendment jurisprudence, but I do not foresee any such appeal being successful. In fact I wonder if it would be classified as frivolous. I do need to add the disclaimer that I am only commenting on the facts contained in the story linked below and did not seek out or watch the referenced video personally.

A federal jury in Tennessee has convicted an Army sergeant for threatening a judge in a YouTube video. Franklin Delano

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Continuing to follow the news of social media and its discovery potential in a legal dispute bring us to the post linked below:

An Albuquerque, N.M., policeman who listed his job description as “human waste disposal” on Facebook has caught the attention of lawyers who filed a wrongful death suit against the city for a police shooting in January 2010. The lawyers are asking the city to provide Facebook usernames and passwords of 57 police officers who were at the scene after a police detective shot and killed Iraq war veteran Kenneth Ellis, according to the Albuquerque Journal (sub. req.) and KOAT.com. Lawyer Joe Kennedy alleged in an interview with KOAT that officers called to the shooting scene were eating pizza and applauding the fatal shooting of a man they wrongly believed to be a gangbanger. Co-counsel Frances Crockett told the Albuquerque Journal that the officers were likely more candid on Facebook than they would be in a deposition or internal investigation. The officer who listed his job…

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More on the potential implication of commenting publicly on internet postings:

An Indianapolis judge has ruled the state’s shield law does not bar the release of identifying information about online commenters in a defamation lawsuit. The ruling by Judge S.K. Reid of Marion Superior Court requires the Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis Business Journal to release information about anonymous posters, the Indianapolis Star reports. The judge was set to decide this week whether a third outlet, WRTV, must release the information. The defamation suit filed by Jeffrey Miller, former chief executive of Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, targets online statements that allege, among other things, that he “most likely” committed a criminal act and is “the most greedy man I’ve ever known,” the Indianapolis Star reports in a separate story. The Star quotes David Hudson, an ABA Journal freelance writer and a scholar with the First Amendment Center in Nashville. He said the public should…

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An Internet retailer called Full House Appliances expressed its displeasure when a customer posted a negative review on the ResellerRatings website. The company dispatched an e-mail to the commenter warning that libel is a prosecutable offense in Washington State where it operates, and it intends to pursue legal action absent a mutually agreeable settlement, the New York Times reports in its Haggler column. The e-mail asserts that the customer had violated Full House Appliance’s terms and conditions—requirements that all consumers must accept before ordering from the company. The Times quotes from the terms and conditions, including this one: “I understand that libel is a prosecutable felony in the state where FHA operates. I agree that if I intend to provide negative feedback, the only legitimate one is based solely on verifiable and documented facts, i.e., the e-mail, live chat transcript and all the terms and conditions…

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Another posts from Kashmir Hill on her blog THE NOT-SO PRIVATE PARTS covers the issue of the hosting site “fighting” subpoena aimed at discovering the identities of their users. This is growing area of litigation that is yet to be settled.

Facebook’s lawyers have been looking for a rumble over the company’s responsibility to turn over user’s account information in legal cases. Now they’ve got one, thanks to a California juror and his grandstanding defense attorney.

Engadget has a post about Sony’s pursuit of the “programmer” who shared “jailbreak” codes for the PS3 on the internet. To me the most interesting thing about the post is the following, “Casting its evidence-gathering net far and wide, SCEA has demanded that YouTube surrender not only information for Hotz’s account where his jailbreak video was posted, but also how many users accessed the video, the usernames of those with access to the video, and all usernames and IP addresses of everyone who posted or published comments to the vid.” (emphasis in original). Just posting a comment on a publicly available video, may now open you up to discovery. It will be interesting to see whether YouTube/Google simply complies or moves to quash the subpoena and notifies those account holders giving them the chance to respond to the subpoena before their personal information is disclosed.

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A legal website that offers “crowdsourced” answers to legal questions posed by California companies, especially startups, is getting $600,000 in funding from Google Ventures and individual investors. The website is called LawPivot, and it could “disrupt some of the [legal] industry’s most basic business practices,” according to a November story by Fast Company. At the time of the article, the 80 lawyers approved to supply confidential answers came from the nation’s top 100 law firms. The companies usually get about three answers for every question asked, CEO Jay Mandal tells the Business Insider. A new feature allows LawPivot to recommend the best lawyers to answer each question by analyzing data on users and trends, the company says in a press release announcing the new algorithm and the new funding. The benefit for lawyers is the possibility of finding new…